Should a newsletter give the value inside the email or send readers to your website?

Put the value in the email. Most newsletters I see get this backwards.

"We provide insane value without having to leave the newsletter."

Readers want value in three minutes, maybe five. If they have to leave the email to get anything, you've built an ad for your website, not a newsletter.

What do most newsletters get wrong?

They send a teaser and a link. "Here, we wrote an article, click here to read it." Most legacy local media still works the way media worked in 2007: it's all about the website and website traffic. Some outlets I've signed up for have a newsletter and don't even send it. Most of the rest send a bunch of links to what's on the site.

There's a reason. Ten or fifteen years ago, traffic to the website is where the money was. That's why a lot of local newsletters are weak. They don't treat the newsletter like a product. They treat it like an ad for the product.

Industry newsletters make the same mistake. They link out to value somewhere else when the reader shouldn't have to leave the newsletter at all.

Where did the newsletter-as-product idea come from?

Morning Brew made it big, around 2016, and later sold a majority stake at a reported value of about $75 million. The Hustle took the same approach. Instead of pushing people from the newsletter somewhere else, they put so much value in the newsletter that people paid attention to the ads in it, and that's where the revenue came from. Not SEO clicks.

Most B2B media gets this now. Local media doesn't. Local is so far behind.

What does value inside the email look like?

Think quick hits. Each item gives you enough information that you feel like you know what's going on without clicking through to the full story. The article is there for anyone who wants more.

Compare that to legacy journalism: super long, about one thing, like one condo complex or a fight over a downtown restaurant. Nobody is going to go to the site and read all of that. We do, and we summarize it for you.

For a business audience, the summary also has to be the right news. Busy owners don't care that a district is opening a new burger stand. They want to hear it a year earlier, when the district signs a million-dollar lease with three developers.

Why does this make the ads worth more?

Because people actually read it. When the newsletter itself is valuable, readers pay close attention to it, and that's why the ads inside it can be valuable. A list of links gets skimmed and closed.

Is the website pointless, then?

No. You should have longer-form stuff down the road, whether that's articles or podcasts. It just isn't the newsletter. The newsletter is value in a short amount of time.

I still think sending people from the newsletter to the website is very valuable. It means the full article has to be written and live on the site before the issue goes out, so the link works. In Beehiiv that's easy, because a newsletter issue and a web article are both just posts.

Content tags decide which section of the website a post lands in, like News, Restaurants or Real Estate, and one post can carry several tags. For a web-only article, turn the email audience off. That's the only difference. The catch is that Beehiiv's site is a closed system with no programmatic ads, so it solves ease of use and looks clean, but it doesn't solve the money side. More on that in whether to publish your newsletter on your own website.

Why don't more publishers do it this way?

It's not that they doubt the value. It's too hard, so they decide it's not worth it. Even huge brands skip it: Joe Rogan doesn't have a newsletter, and neither does the All-In podcast. When I look at what brands are doing, the odds of seeing one doing newsletters well, or even decently, are about one in a hundred. With AI, a good newsletter doesn't have to be hard anymore, which is the whole bet behind lightbreak.